PROCESSOR MICROARCHITECTURE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

Credit Hours: 3 · Undergraduate Upper-Level

The course covers the design and implementation of micro-architectural components of modern CPU and memory systems. Topics covered include static and dynamic pipelines, out-of-order execution, instruction speculation, reorder buffers, static and dynamic branch prediction, multi-threaded, VLIW, and vector processors, cache memory organization and implementation, and an introduction to multiprocessor cache coherence and virtual memory. The course will require Verilog implementations of several micro-architectural components and their integration into a working CPU. Recommended Prerequisite(s): ELEC 425